W2W Belgium 2015

Background

The United States Embassy in Belgium is hosting a leadership conference for 75 young girls from November 4th to 8th, 2015. The “Leadership in Action” conference is organized by the U.S. Embassy in Brussels and Empower Peace, a U.S. nonprofit that works to bridge cultural and communication divides among young people worldwide. The W2W Belgium conference is based upon the Women2Women model, which was created by Empower Peace in 2006 and has brought young women to Boston ever since.

The W2W Belgium conference will take place in Brussels and Antwerp. It will feature young female participants between the ages of 16 and 19 from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. This conference aims to empower young women to develop leadership skills and equip them with the tools to succeed. One critical tool that will enable them to succeed is the network they build at the conference.

It is also important to note that the US Ambassador to Belgium has a deep interest in countering violent extremism. Belgium has been a hotbed for foreign extremist recruits to fight in Syria and Iraq. A piece of the conference will focus on empowering young women to be leaders in their community and to take action on issues that matter to them. The hope of this is to inoculate communities against vulnerabilities to extremist ideology and recruitment.

Research Questions

• Was the conference successful at bringing together young women of different backgrounds?
• How meaningful were these connections?
• Were there interfaith connections?
• Who were the key players? Do they come from a specific background?
• Who has the conference helped most in connecting with others?
• What messages, mediums and messengers work best to inoculate young women from extremist ideology?
• Was the conference successful at creating leadership amongst these 75 young women?

Hypothesis

As with the W2W Boston 2014 data, we saw that the conference was powerful at bringing together young women from around the world. Since the November conference contains a smaller group of young women from a more geographically concentrated area, we hypothesize that we will see even more connectedness than in the Boston W2W conference, particularly because there should be minimal language barriers and (ostensibly) similar cultures. We hope that the Belgian group can form even stronger and more connected ties that can last well beyond the conference.

We hope to see large social media use amongst the girls. We want to discover what platforms they use and what content they share on these sites. This will help target what messaging is effective in engaging 16-19 year old Belgian girls on a number of issues.

Currently we cannot hypothesize about the religious background of the participants; however, it would be interesting if we saw connections across religious backgrounds made during the conference, particularly with regards to studies lauding the value of interfaith dialogue as a tool for countering violent extremism. This is an element of our research that we cannot adequately predict based on existing data extracted from previous conferences.

Data

We will gather all of our data through an online survey system (Survey Monkey). We have designed a Survey Monkey based upon the original W2W 2014 Boston survey. However, we have modified it to reflect the Belgian context and needs of the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. The survey will be translated from English to French and Dutch (Flemish) to ensure that participants fully understand the questions asked.

Before the conference, the participants will receive an email asking for their participation in an online survey. Participation in all surveys is voluntary and will not impinge upon their ability to attend the conference. The survey will gather information about their connectedness, social media usage, and individual issues of interest. This will give us a significant amount of attribute data to discover underlying connections in the conference.

We intend to analyze the data in UCINET in a similar manner as we did for the W2W Boston 2014 project in the first part of the Social Networks course. We will look at factions, cliques, centrality measures, ego networks and other applicable measurements to understand the network.

Conclusion

By analyzing the data from the W2W Belgium 2015 conference we aim to provide helpful insights into the connectedness of participants, as well as identify avenues for future connections to leverage the expertise and interests of the network and foster cross-collaboration.

Analysis of pre-conference data will help us understand how well connected participants are to one another prior to the gathering, which will give us a sense of the reach of this program. Through post-conference survey data, we can assess the impact of the inaugural Belgium program, both in bringing together young women from diverse backgrounds and in exposing them to leadership and other useful skills for success in their respective fields. We will also identify which social media platforms these young women use most often and for what purposes, information that when coupled with unearthing each participant’s ‘embeded-ness’ in her home community and the figures she admires and turns to for guidance, can be a powerful tool for improving current State Department and NGO engagement efforts targeting these communities. We also believe that the impact assessment and analysis of participant profiles will yield critical information for multiple stakeholders, beyond the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, Empower Peace and Tufts researchers.

Our specific research interests lie in better understanding how to use social network analysis to identify key players (“influencers”) whose social media presence, civic engagement and activism make them ideal candidates for outreaching to communities vulnerable to radicalization. Ultimately, if we ascertain that the W2W model of building the leadership skills and social media capacities of targeted groups (in this case, 16-19 year old women), in conjunction with increasing their connectedness, is effective, the program could serve as a prototype for future endeavors aiming to leverage the power of influencers in catalyzing a ripple effect on communities far beyond the scope of the original participants.

For more information about the program:

http://w2wbelgium.org/about.html